"E. C. Tubb - Dumarest 01 - The Winds of Gath" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tubb E. C)

"We're three days flight from Gath."
***
 Close your eyes, hold your breath, concentrate. On Gath you
can hear the music of the spheres!

So claimed the admen and they could have been telling the
truthтАФDumarest had never wanted to find out. Gath was for
tourists with a two-way ticket. It was an "attraction" with no
home industry, no stable society in which a traveler could work
to build the price of get-away fare. A dead, dumb, blind-alley of a
world at the end of the line.

He stood at the edge of the field looking it over. He wasn't
alone. Down past the leveled area, crouched in the scoop of a
valley running down to the sea, squatted a huddle of ramshackle
dwellings. They reflected the poverty which hung over them like
a miasma. They gave some shelter and a measure of privacy and
that was all.

Further off and to one side, on some high ground well away
from the danger of the field and the smell of the camp, sat a
prim collection of prefabricated huts and inflatable tents. There
sat the money and the comfort money could provideтАФthe
tourists who traveled High, doped with quick-time so that a day
seemed an hour, a week a day.

Those in the camp had traveled like DumarestтАФLow. Those
who rode Middle stayed with the ships which were their home.
They would stay, so Benson had said, until after the storm. Then
they would leave. Others would return for the next storm. On
Gath that was about four months. An age.

Dumarest walked from the field, thrusting his way past a
handful of men who stared at the ships with hopeless eyes,
feeling his boots sink into the dirt as he left the hardened
surface. It was hot, the air heavy, the humidity high. He opened
his collar as he entered the camp. A narrow lane wound between
the dwellings, uneven and thick with dust. It would lead, he
knew, to a central areaтАФcommon to all such encampments. He
was looking for information. He found it sooner than he hoped.

A man sat before the open front of one of the dwellings. It had
been clumsily built from scraps of discarded plastic sheeting
supported by branches, weighted with rocks. The man was
bearded, dirty, his clothing a shapeless mess. He stooped over a
boot trying to mend a gaping rip in the side. He looked up as
Dumarest approached.

"Earl!" The boot and scraps of twisted wire fell aside as he
sprang to his feet. "Man, am I sorry to see you!"